Microsoft Word is a widely used word processing program. It comes installed on most Windows-based PCs, and it is an easy way to compose text-based documents. Follow these basic steps and you should have no problem using Word in your daily life.

Double click on the clock display in your screen’s lower right corner. A window will pop up and display 3 tabs. The first is “Internet Time,” which gives you the option to automatically synchronize your computer with the Internet timeserver. The next tab is “Time Zone,” which is important for ensuring your computer automatically updates for daylight savings time. The final, “Date & Time,” allows you to do exactly what its name suggests: Change your computer’s date and time.

Open Word and close the document pane (which sometimes appears on the right side of the screen). You will be presented with a blank document. You can change the view of the window by clicking “Options” in the “View” menu. Find the layout that works best for your needs. The program will still work the same no matter what you choose. The document will simply be displayed differently as you type it.

The tool bar at the top of the screen has a zoom feature. You can leave it at the default, 100% view, or zoom in or out to suit your eyesight.

Type a sentence in your document. The tool bar displays the font you are using and its size. You can change these setting by highlighting any amount of text you wish to alter and then using the dropdown menus to change the size and font.

If you’re looking to put a word in bold text, highlight it and press “control” and the “b” key at the same time. Repeat this step to return the text to its normal look. You can also make text bold by highlighting it and clicking the dark, black “B” button in the tool bar. The same steps apply for italicizing text, but you will need to press control and the “i” key or the “I” button located in the top tool bar.

If you need to duplicate any amount of text, you can easily do so with the copy & paste functions. To do this, highlight the desired text and use one of the following methods:

1. Right click on the highlighted text and click “Copy.” You can also move the text by selecting “Cut.” Place the text by right clicking where you want it to be located and clicking “Paste.” You can also:

2. Press control and “c” to copy text, control and “x” to cut it, and control and “v” to paste it. Keep in mind, after you have cut or copied text, you can paste it as many times as you would like as long as you do not copy another selection of text.

If you are looking for text you previously entered in the document, click “Edit” and the select “Find.” Enter the text you are looking for and click the “Find Next” button. The first instance of the text will be highlighted in the Word document. Keep clicking “Find Next” until you locate the word or phrase you are looking for.

If you want to correct a mistake that occurs several times throughout the document, open the “Find” window again and go to the “Replace’ tab. Enter the text you want to correct in the top box and the correction in the bottom one. Click “Replace” to fix one instance or “Replace All” to fix the problem every time it occurs.

Transcription:

OK, welcome to beyourownit.com’s free video series where we offer a variety of computer‑related tips and tricks, troubleshooting problems, and tutorials. And the last category, tutorials, is going to be where we start today with a beginner’s guide to Microsoft Word. Probably everyone out there has at least used it or seen it before and what I’m going to do is just spend a few minutes showing you a couple of the basic features of Word.

We’re going to start with creating a document. When you open Microsoft Word, let’s open it from scratch. When you open it you have the document window over here sometimes. To close it you just hit this little X right here.

To change the view of what you’re looking at, I honestly like the print layout, but it has a lot of different kinds. You can have the normal layout where you don’t have the margins showing, the web layout. None of this really matters, it’s just how you prefer to see how you type.

Here’s a zoom feature, here where you can change how far you need to zoom in. Let’s type. “This is a sentence.”

OK, now up here it shows you that I’m currently typing in Times New Roman and font size 12. In order to change that, if you just need to change one word or an entire sentence or the entire document, you just need to click it, hold down the mouse and highlight what you need to change. Go to the drop‑down arrow. Select your size.

Twelve is standard. Times New Roman is also standard. So if you’re typing a paper for someone, I’d leave these set.

Now if you’re just having a hard time seeing what you’re writing, use the zoom feature here where it says 100%, maybe you want to go 200%. Everything gets a lot bigger. The font size is still 12 twelve but it just zooms in, so if you have a hard time seeing what’s on the screen, you can use the zoom feature to get a better look at things.

Some other features, and I’ll show you kind of a shortcut, if you want to bold a word, you can just highlight it and use control B as in boy on the keyboard. You can see it bolds it. Un‑bold it, do the exact same thing, gone.

You can use, across the top toolbar here they also have the black B. That’s also a way of bolding it. The same thing with Italics, highlight a word, hit control I and you can undo it by hitting control I again.

Also while highlighted, you can use the I shortcut. It may be up here on your screen. It may be under this little menu that I have depending on what screen resolution you have.

Now to save the document, I’m going to jump around a little bit, but I just want to mention to you that no matter what, when you start typing something, you should save it.

Go to File, Save As, name your document and just set Save. And then save often as you type, just in case something happens, your computer locks up, somebody comes to your room and shuts off your computer or closes your window without talking to you. There can be a lot of things that happen, I just always recommend saving.

Next thing I’m going to show you is the copy and paste. If you have something that you need duplicated many times, you need only highlight it. There’s a couple of ways to do this, you can right click in your highlighted area and you can copy it which just makes a copy of it. You can cut it if you need to move it. See how it disappears? Or you can paste it by right clicking going to paste.

Some other ways to do this is, you highlight it and hit control X on your keyboard. That cuts it. Control V pastes it. Or if you want to copy it, control C. And if you want to do something over and over again you can just keep hitting control V over and over and over and over again and it’ll keep pasting whatever you’ve copied.

The next thing I want to show you a little bit is some more advanced stuff, is going to be the find and replace. You go to Edit, then Find. Now if you’re just looking for a word in your document, you can use the find feature. Let’s say I’m typing Jeremy and I hit Find. See it highlights the first one. I could find the next copy, the next copy, the next copy, all sorts of things.

The Replace, which is really neat, let’s say you made a mistake in the whole document. Let’s say, like you see here I forgot to capitalize my name. I can replace it with my name capitalized. Whoops!

And you can either choose replace one instance or replace them all. I’ll go replace all. Word will tell me, OK, there’s six times that it’s done it and as you can see, all of them are fixed. Now, if you want to try something, let’s say I wanted to put my last name on there. You can still find Jeremy and replace it with this. Add a last name on it.